1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to systems and methods for call management, and more particularly to varying a call center dialog property.
2. Discussion of Background Art
Call centers are increasingly used to manage calls to and from a variety of entities and in a variety of applications. Some entities (i.e. contacts) include, existing customers, potential customers, suppliers, and vendors. Some call center applications include, providing movie theatre listings and driving directions, automated banking, and product marketing.
Such systems often use Interactive Voice Response (IVR) software as a first step in processing an incoming call before connecting the contact with a human operator. The IVR software tends to improve the call center's efficiency and reduce a number of human operators required to handle the contacts.
In a typical dialog between the IVR software and the contact, the IVR software presents the contact with either information or a question. The contact listens to the information or question, and then responds in some way, either by requesting more information or answering the question. The IVR system's portion of the dialog typically consists of either prerecorded messages or synthesized text generated by a Text-To-Speech (TTS) algorithm.
However, while the actual information presented to the contact can greatly vary depending upon the outcome of such questions and answers, how that information is presented to the contact tends to have a fixed set of properties which are set when the IVR system's software is first compiled. Such rigid properties often present the IVR system's dialog in a wooden, awkward, inefficient, and hard to understand way, so much so that contacts often become confused and or frustrated with the dialog, resulting in either a lost sale, or premature connection to a human operator.
So while an IVR system designer might be able to modify how the IVR system presents the dialog before an IVR system's source code is compiled, present call center IVR systems do not give contacts control in how the IVR system's dialogs are presented during execution the IVR system's object code.
In response to the concerns discussed above, what is needed is a system and method for call management that overcomes the problems of the prior art.